ZiZi series is a collaboration project with artist Joseph Marzolla. With ZiZi we want to explore how handicraft, design and art can work together and how the contemporary and the traditional can meet. We are expanding the boundaries until they explode, re-appropriating and disturbing the routine, and being surprised by the outcome.

We choose very sober patterns of body parts and also words in English, German and Greenlandic that describe feelings that one usually keeps out of view. Thus we are playing with the reindeer antler origins as a body part that dislocated itself from the body and posing questions on body boundaries, including the mental emotional functions.

For the first ZiZi object we commissioned a local carver in Nuuk, Greenland, that usually carves traditional and tourist friendly patterns out of reindeer antlers, to carve our own designs out of the same material.

The carvings are meant to be worn like Amulets hanging on the neck or other body parts of the wearer. Thus we refer to traditional Amulets. Amulets were objects traditionally thought to be useful in an given situation. They were made out of any material laying around and worn on the body, either sown into a strap or into clothing. Amulets were worn for a long life, good hunting and safety at sea, against sickness and its after-effects. An amulet was a very secret and personal thing much like our contemporary version the ZiZi amulet.